Verbal

Let's be clear about this. If Deppo had had a warm and snuggly relationship with the admin he wouldn't have been banned. From the outside looking in, there's a strong suspicion that this was personal. Unless you were your usual hyperactive self, Deppo wasn't being reported by other members. So why else was he singled out?

It wasn't pointless. It didn't derail the thread. You weren't offended. Nobody died. Really, what is the point of you?

And that offended you how exactly?

I like GS. But without wanting to sound too much like a fan, if I see Deppo's name pop up on the menu page I click on it. I'm sure many others do too, even if they might not want to admit it. Now that this forum is ad-supported I suspect that traffic numbers are important. In that regard, losing Deppo and other like him seems not the most sensible move. Sometimes, though, you have to have the plain common sense to understand that although rules need to exist and to be adhered to, there are some whose inventiveness and humour are quite simply worth looking the other way for.

PinkScarf's was one of the threads we're led to assume Deppo 'derailed'. Frankly, the mind boggles.

It doesn't answer a damned thing if we don't know what the '19 opportunities' were. I have to say in all honesty I haven't read a single thing posted by Deppo that I could see as worth an infraction - even on a thread where another poster (who was crowing on here about the banning) wished him dead.

So if Deppo comes back on here under another name, you'll accept him in the same way you accepted dune, right?

I'm not sure but it's been suggested it was for his last post on the 'save our saint' thread. If that's true, it is (in the unfunny sense) laughable.

There does seem to be a strong suspicion that this is personal. If so, pursuing vendettas in this petty way doesn't exactly cover the powers that be in glory. Losing any poster is depressing - but losing one of the most entertaining ones 'permanently' is self-defeating.

Not the smartest move.

New moisturiser?

Thank you. At least I won't have to sue you.

Awful. Rooney must have been pulling his hair out.

A Saints fan long before that unfortunate spermatazoic collision resulting in you.

My cv is like a novel you can't put down.

It was what the funnily enough referred to.

West Africans don't.

No I don't. This is a particularly odd idea. It's true that men and women of African descent tend to win 100 metres etc. Is that genetic? If so, why is it that today's West Africans - from whom African Americans and Afro Caribbeans are almost all descended - don't also win 100 metres? Slavery was a process of selection. Only the fittest were of high value, survived the journey, and then survived years in the plantations. Their descendants are the fast runners of today. So no, not genetic but environmental. And nothing whatsoever to do with race.

As is a headline in the Daily Mail

This is of course true.

This isn't true. Sickle-cell anaemia affects peoples who've historically developed resistance to malaria. So those for example of West African descent, including many Afro-Carribbean people as well as black Americans, suffer from it in greater proportions than others. But so do people from the Mediterranean (Cypriots notably) and Indians. Every time someone tries to pin something on 'race' it quickly turns to dust. Sickle-cell anaemia, like many 'heritable' diseases, has its origins in environmental conditions.

In that case, perhaps he can explain why the new theory of quantum certainty is wrong.

It may make no difference at all. The Arab Spring has made Al Qaeda look irrelevant. Its cynical murder mostly of Muslims had already discredited it widely in the Middle East and had already undermined any popular appeal. I suspect the real danger is the rift between Pakistan and the US growing to the point where Pakistan is left to its own devices and becomes a pitched battleground between secularists and resurgent Islamists.

Sort of true, except that the ISI trained the Pakistani Taliban, not the Afghan one, for the purpose of waging a proxy war against India in Kashmir. And then things got out of hand - the Pakistani Taliban has for some years now been taking the fight to Afghanistan.